Material relief by public and private agencies will have to be supplemented by constructive social service long after the depression lifts, in the opinion of Samuel Rabinovitch, executive director of the United Jewish Aid Societies of Brooklyn, who yesterday made public an analysis of the work of the organization, an affiliate of the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Charities.
“The matter of rehabilitating an individual who has come to us for aid,” said Rabinovitch, “is a slow and difficult process. Sometimes the headway made is slow and discouraging, but at other times you see a person who was broken in mind and spirit, shunned and unwanted by the world, emerge into a normal, healthy being. Then you realize that your work is well rewarded.
“There is a never-ending procession that keeps making its way to the gates of the societies,” he declared. “Cripples, tuberculars, cardiacs, mental cases and helpless women with even more helpless children. People come from all over Brooklyn. It is the constant march of the diseased and the deformed, seeking help and guidance in a world that has no use for any but the able and the fit. In the lists of the United Jewish Aid Societies there were 5,300 families in 1933, and of these a large proportion were unemployed.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
